Outages, shortages, peanut butter, and duct tape: The trials and tribulations of life in a small jungle town on the Pacific Coast of Costa Rica.

Sometime in mid-April,at around 5 p.m., take off your clothes and grab a towel and head to the bathroom, step into the shower and turn the knob, and you’ll be met all at once with an odd spluttering of water, followed by an ominous hiss of air. This is because there has been no rain here since November, and the water cisterns have been running lower and lower for the past several weeks, and whoever’s in charge is now rationing the precious liquid resources that supply the jungle town that, for these past several months, I have called home.

Logic might dictate that a round-the-clock system-wide reduction in pressure would allow would-be showerers to avoid the daytime hoarding of water into six-liter jugs, placed in refrigerators and by bathrooms to drink, to bathe, to flush the toilet. Alas, this logic does not seem to work here. They (whoever “they” may be) have decided that from an hour before sunset until an hour after sunrise, certain houses, in certain neighborhoods of Nosara, will be without water during the most terrifically, apocalyptically hot time of year, a situation speculated upon in juice bars and at markets, among talk of dengue outbreaks and home burglaries, with sentences whose grammatical structures always seem to involve some combination of I heard and they, including but not limited to: “I’ve heard that they’ve only been rationing water to homes in the K-Section,” or, “I hear they’re working on the tanks at night, which is why they’re doing system-wide shutdowns,” or, “I’m hearing that they cut the water because so-and-so didn’t pay his water donation.” Read more at Travel + Leisure.